The Master Sniper (29 page)

“Go on, beat it, get the fuck outta here!” he yelled, and they ran off, terrified.

Awkwardly he got Shmuel up off the stretcher. Once he had him in his arms, he was astonished at how light he was after the groans of the pallbearers. He climbed into the pit and a cloud of lime dust swirled up over his boots, whitening them. The chemical stung his nose and eyes and he noticed most of the men around had masks on.

“Hey, Captain, you’ll want out of there. We’re shoveling ’em under now.” It was another officer, calling from the far side. An engine gunned into life. The bright blade of a bulldozer lurched into view over the pit’s edge, pushing before it a liquid tide of loose earth.

Leets laid Shmuel down. Any place in here was fine. He put him down in a long row of nearly fleshless forms.

Leets climbed out and brushed himself off and waved all clear. The dozer began to muscle the earth in and Leets watched for a second as it rolled over them.

“And that’s it? That’s all?”

He turned. Susan was standing there.

“Susan, I—it just—” and he ran out of words.

She looked at him blankly. Behind him the dozer lurched and tracked and flattened the soft earth.

“It just happened,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

She continued to stare.

“There was nothing any of us could do. I feel responsible. He’d come so far.”

In the sunlight, he could see how colorless her face had become. She looked badly in need of sleep. Her work with the dying, with the victims, must have been gruesome and dreadful; it must be eating her, for she looked ill. A fine sheen of bright sweat stood out on her upper lip.

“Everything you touch,” she said, “turns to death, doesn’t it?”

Leets had no answer. He watched her walk away.

There was the note, of course.

He had not forgotten it; but it took awhile to find a man among the prisoners who could read it.

Leets had a headache and Tony was impatient, and the translator, a bright young Polish Communist, played them for two packs of Luckies before delivering.

“That’s not much,” said Leets, handing over the cigarettes, feeling cheated.

“You asked, I answered,” the man said.

“It’s not much to die for.”

“He didn’t die for it. He got caught in a bad accident. Accidents are a feature of war, don’t you see?” Tony said. “It must be some sort of code name.”

Leets tried to clear his head. They were in the office where the interrogations had taken place. He still saw the rail yard full of corpses, Shmuel smashed to nothingness in the dust, the huddled forms laid out under the chemical snow, Susan in her nurse’s uniform glaring at him, eyes vivid with accusation.

He looked again at the word. It had to have some significance, some double meaning. It wasn’t arbitrary.

“Don’t they have an SS division called ‘Nibelungen’?”

“The Thirty-seventh,” confirmed Tony. “A mechanized infantry outfit. Third-rate, conscriptees, the lame, the halt, somewhere out in Prussia against the Russians. But that’s not it. This has been a
Totenkopfdivision
operation the whole way. Repp and the Anlage Elf defenders.
Totenkopf
is old Nazi—part of the elite, among the first of the Waffen SS formations. They go way back, to the camps, to the very beginning. They’d have no truck with second-raters like the Thirty-seventh.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Actually, it’s quite a common name in Germany. The street between this lovely spot and the town of Dachau is in fact Nibelungenstrasse. Isn’t that interesting?”

“I wonder if—” Leets began.

“No: it’s nothing to do with that curious coincidence. I guarantee you. No, there’s a joke in this. There’s some hammy German humor. I see the touch of a Great Wit, a jokester.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s rather too clever, actually,” Tony pointed out.

Leets, way behind, requested clarification. “So what’s the punch line?” he demanded.

“It’s an opera.”

“Oh, yes, Wagnerian, huh? Some huge thing, goes on for hours. Has to do with a ring.”

“Yes.
Ring of the Nibelung
. A great hero named Siegfried steals it from them. That’s the joke. Repp’s Siegfried.”

“Who are the Nibelungen?” Leets asked.

“I’m getting to that.” He smiled. “The Nibelungen, my friend, are a tribe of dwarves, in the oldest stories. Living underground. Guarding a treasure.”

W
here was she?

He checked his watch. Two hours, she’d been out two hours!

He was upstairs. He peeled back the curtain from the window and looked down the street, as far as he could see. Nothing. He’d done this a dozen times in the past few minutes, and each time his reward had been the same, nothing.

He felt warmly damp in his civilian clothes. He could not get comfortable in them. The shoes were no damned good either, blunt-tipped bluchers, pebble-grained, with cap toes, yet they rubbed a blister onto his left heel. Now he walked with a limp! Locked in this stuffy little house, he was falling apart; he hobbled about in another man’s clothes with a headache and digestive problems, and a short temper and a blister on his heel. He woke up at night in cold sweats. He heard sounds, jumped at shadows.

He really was not cut out for this sort of business, the polite waiting in an untouched residential section.

He sat back, pulled out his pack of cigarettes.

He looked again out the window, even though it had been only a few seconds.

He saw the truck swing around the corner.

It was a military vehicle, moving slowly down the Neugasse toward him. Big thing, dark green after their fashion, about the size of an Opel Blitz, a white star bold on its hood. Soldiers seemed crowded in the back: he could see their helmets bobbing as the truck rumbled along.

Repp drew back from the window, and had the P-38 in his hand.

He threw the slide on the pistol … he felt very cool all of a sudden. It seemed a great weight had been drained away. His headache vanished. He knew he had seven rounds in the pistol. All right, if it was worth six of them to take him, then six it would be. He’d save the last for his own temple. Briefly, he wished he had his uniform. Better that than this silly outfit, banker’s pants, white shirt, shoes that did not fit, like a common gangster.

He was breathing heavily. He crouched at the stairway. He heard the truck outside, nearly up to the house. His finger moved the safety on the grip of the pistol to off. The weapon felt cold and big in his hand. His heart pounded heavily. He knew the truck would stop shortly, and he’d hear the running feet as one squad headed out back. He was all ready. He was set.

“ALL CIVILIANS ARE WARNED THAT CURFEW IS 6 P.M. REPEAT ANNOUNCEMENT: ALL CIVILIANS ARE WARNED THAT CURFEW IS 6 P.M. YOU WILL BE DETAINED IF FOUND OUTSIDE AFTER 6 P.M.”

The speaker on the truck boomed like an artillery shell as it drew even with the house, vibrating through the wood, causing the windows to rattle. It continued on, growing fainter, until it finally went away.

I
t began appearing in odd places.

“Yes, here, by God,” shouted Tony, “mess records. March eighteenth and nineteenth, meals in the SS canteen, a hundred and three men, charged not to a unit but to one word: Nibelungen.”

Nibelungen: April 11, supplies from the central storage facility at Dachau dispatched: rations, equipment, replacement, fuel allotments.

February 13: Ammunition requisition; 25 crates 7.92 mm X 33 kurz; 25 crates 7.92 mm belted;
Stielhandgranate
, Model 44, 3 crates.

March 7: More food, a wire requisition, construction supplies.

The total mounted. A hundred scraps of information providing for the creation and nurture of Operation Nibelungen,
GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE!!!
highest Reich secrecy order and priority.

“It was higher than the rocket program even. My God,” said Leets.

Roaming through the CIC Documents Center, a clearinghouse the Army investigative unit had established at Dachau, Leets and Outhwaithe in one frantic
day seemed to succeed wherever they touched. The files here were jumbled, immense, confusing stacks and tiers of paper; yet always, on the buff folders, one stamped word, whatever the category:
NIBELUNGEN.

“We were so lucky,” Leets said. “If Shmuel hadn’t gotten to the old man. And if he hadn’t written it down. And if I hadn’t picked up—”

“We’ve been lucky all the way through. And yet we’re still no closer. I find that quite a bothersome thing.”

Leets scored. “Here,” he hooted, “under ‘Construction and Supply,’ the original site preparation order. Sixteenth of November ’44, orders here for a construction battalion to prepare a site for experimental purposes. In the Schwarzwald. Code name Nibelungen. Chalked off to WVHA. And a list of specs, required equipment.”

“Special transportation orders, these. Moving some solid-state testing gear down from Kummersdorf, the
WaPrüf 2
testing facility up near Berlin. These instructions mandate special care to be taken with the delicate instrumentation. Date fourth of January, the very beginning of the thing.”

“We’re really cooking,” Leets crowed. “Goddamn, now we’re getting somewhere.”

Leets’s fingers pawed through the drawers and vaults of the files. He worked quickly, but with thoroughness, and did not stop for lunch or dinner. He would have stayed busy late into the night on his prowl through the paper labyrinths of the Third Reich but there came a moment when a shadow fell across the face of the document he was examining and in that same second a
mousy voice, full of self-recrimination and humility, spoke up.

“Uh, sir. Captain Leets. Sir?”

Leets looked up through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“Gad, he’s back,” said Outhwaithe.

Roger stood shyly before him.

And Roger was some help, this time. He would not talk of Paris, or explain; he was not full of his match or himself. He even, for a day or so, worked hard as they continued their hunt through the paper work. And he came up with some possibly pertinent material: a Nibelungen-coded requisition for wind-tunnel data on projectile performance from the
Luftfahrt Forschungsanstal
, the Air Force research establishment at Braunschweig; and a record of marks for enlisted personnel taking part in the Dachau antitank course in mid-March, including 103 names identified as
Totenkopfdivision
—Nibelungen.

But still piles and piles of material remained to be gone through. Leets’s frustration took the form of a headache, and it increased as that afternoon wore on. At one point, late, he looked up and around the Documents Center and took no pleasure from what he saw: they were alone in the place, the CIC clerks having taken off for the day, and all around there seemed to be stacks and cartons of German documents. It reminded Leets much of the office back in London where, months ago, this had all begun. From this similarity he extrapolated a single message: they had not made any progress, any real progress, into the middle of the thing.

His frustration was amplified by news that Roger had brought from the outside—that the war seemed finally
to be winding down. It was certainly in its last phase, and this made Leets uncomfortable. He had decided that Repp’s strike was tied to the end of things, somehow, in some form; it was a part of the process of the death of the Reich. The Russians were now said to be in Berlin—Berlin!—and German forces had capitulated up north, in Holland, northeast Germany and Denmark. Meanwhile Patton’s sweep had carried him all the way into Czechoslovakia—Pilsen, the last reports said.

Everybody was doing so
well;
he was doing
lousy
.

He slammed down the sheet he had, some nonsense on Nibelungen-coded mess receipts. Mess receipts! Damn it, the Reich should have ground to a halt back in ’43, its gears jammed tight on the tons of paper it produced. The Germans should have dropped paper bombs which killed by sheer weight with as much effectiveness as high explosives. They recorded everything in triplicate and the more they recorded, the more evidence accumulated, but the harder it was to put one’s hand on anything specific.

“Damn it, this just isn’t getting us anywhere,” he complained.

Tony, similarly immersed in documents at another table, looked up and said, “You’d rather be perched on a roadblock somewhere? Or knocking on doors with the boys in the trench coats?”

Of course not, Leets told himself. But more manpower would have been some help, to prowl these acres of paper. And even then, would that have done it? It was clear now that Nibelungen was built, maintained
and controlled out of Dachau; all the documents pointed to it. But that was it: they pointed to Anlage Elf and Leets already had Anlage Elf. What he needed was another direction, another step in the chain, higher up on the ladder. To Berlin, perhaps. To WVHA headquarters at Unter den Eichen but the Russians were there. Would they cooperate? How long would it take? What shape were the WVHA files in anyway?

“Aspirin?” he asked.

“Huh? Oh, I got some in my bag, just a sec,” Roger said. “What’s a
Schusswunde?
Gunshot wound, right?”

“Yes,” Leets said, but then noted the folder Roger was reading. “Hey, what the hell is that?” he barked.

It was marked
Der Versuch
.

“Uh, file I picked up.”

Der Versuch
meant experiment.

It was at last too much. Leets’s headache would not go away and Roger was pouring time down the drain, and Susan was even more unreachable than before and Shmuel was dead and Repp was closer to his target.

“Goddamn it, you little son of a bitch, I ought to kick your rich little ass to Toledo. That has nothing to do with our stuff. What the fuck, kid, you think this is some kind of reading room, some fucking Harvard library or something?” he spat out venomously.

Roger looked up in horror. Even Tony was shaken by the black rage in Leets’s words.

“Jesus, Captain, I’m sorry,” said Roger. “I was just—”

“Listen, we’re all running without a lot of sleep and these last days have been unpleasant ones,” Tony
pointed out. “Perhaps we’d best close down the shop for today.”